Something which doesn't always come across is that PUG is (and has always been) something we all do in our "spare" time. With the loss of Colin and Liam to the dark side, departures of several others such as Penny, and various pressures on others, those of us remaining were stretched pretty thin.

As Mike says, there's always been a wide range of knowledge and abilities since the days of Ian's initial group, but as well as this there needs to be people with the technical skills to handle the website, write communications, etc to ensure that information about activity taking place and any outputs is able to be made available in a timely manner. Things change fast in the ISP world and we know we've not always managed to reflect that with the speed of our communications.

However, I think the current situation is not a negative place to be - it puts us in a great position to embrace new people with fresh ideas and opinions.

Well I have used Joomla, SMF, Etomite, & phpBB to varying degrees and would be capable of performing all sorts of housekeeping tasks on the portal/forums (though not coding, I know my limitations ).

I have no intention though of PM'ing wildmind to secretly try and join a self selecting, unaccountable, clique - however well intentioned they are. Have open and above board elections for full usergroup membership and I'll consider standing for that though, and if I can assist then with the portal/forum I would. But as I said earlier, IMO membership should be primaraly about representing the userbase to Plusnet not about how good you are at building websites/forums.

Being short of skills in certain areas is no excuse for not holding open elections. All you need to do is ask people to bear in mind those shortages when voting.

membership should be primaraly about representing the userbase to Plusnet not about how good you are at building websites/forums.

Absolutely true, but it's equally true that no matter how good the usergroup is at representing the userbase if there's no-one able to turn the outputs of that representation into a format that can subsequently be communicated out to the users. We need to find the balance between people with the skills to maintain/develop the systems stuff, those whose focus is on communicating and the rest of us. The important thing about PUG is that everyone is able to bring something to the table, whether it be the aforementioned skills, or representing specific interests of the userbase.